Sunday, June 24, 2018

The U.S. military -industrial complex protection racket is still going at full force: invent enemies and then pretend to protect everyone - at a cost of hundreds of billions! The ruling elite have their nice mansions, golf courses, and lush green lawns, but I have read that underground nuclear bomb shelters are all in vogue too. Very nice. KVLast week, the House Appropriations Committee advanced a lavish $674.6 billion Pentagon spending bill for fiscal year 2019. That means Congress is preparing to spend even more on defense, which isn’t at all shocking. To even marginally decrease defense spending, according to its champions, would be disastrous. After Senator Rand Paul proposed a “penny plan” to balance the budget with minor cuts, Senator Lindsey Graham warned his peers that the initiative “creates the one thing we can’t afford, which is unpredictability.” This attitude shapes Congress’s treatment of the defense budget, even though “unpredictability” is intrinsically inescapable and feverishly spending in an effort to evade it costs us the very liberty that our military ostensibly protects.

When World War II ended, defense spending fell significantly. President Truman was left wondering how to persuade Congress to fund various geopolitical projects—such as wiring $400 million to Greece to stymie a communist revolt—without the pretext of war. Senator Arthur Vandenberg forthrightly advisedhim to “scare the hell out of the American people,” and so he did with great success. Later presidents followed suit throughout the Cold War and, together, they funded an extravagant arms race that lasted until the Soviet Union fell. And then, when it was apparent that castigating the “Red Menace” would no longer work, General Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saidrevealingly, “I’m running out of demons…. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.”

Shortly, however, new demons were conjured up from the Middle Eastern sands and the defense budget has been distended ever since. If this cycle of inflated spending and fearsome rhetoric were some sort of perverse exercise towards geopolitical predictability, perhaps it would be pardonable. But it isn’t. In addition to our scruples, it costs us our liberty.